Women are the broken backbone

of our nation's education system

First, a story from a friend.

I was hired at the same time as my male colleague, Tom.  

At the time of hiring, I was a full-time, licensed teacher, but I was paid hourly with no health insurance. This continued for about 4 months, until I threatened to leave. Then I was provided a contract, but because I didn’t have it at the beginning of a school year, I lost out on a year towards tenure.

At his time of hiring, Tom was signed to a contract. He held a science license (as did I), and he was able to negotiate a higher than normal starting pay; he was also credited several years of experience that he didn’t actually have, putting him farther along on the salary matrix.

Tom and I both became parents. We both had two children. I took long maternity leaves with both of my kids and therefore lost two years of experience, putting me farther behind on the salary matrix.

So for quite some time, the two of us, science teachers hired in the same year, were separated 5-6 years on the pay scale.

Then I earned a PhD and advanced in education enough to catch up to him.

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When I asked my female teacher friends for their thoughts and experiences of being a woman in the education profession, this was one anecdote I received, just about verbatim. Nobody denies the male-female wage gap; it’s all well documented and persists despite enduring efforts to mitigate or erase it. But I always thought, as a teacher covered by a collective bargaining agreement (CBA), that I was guaranteed the same pay for the same work done by a male colleague whose years and education parallel mine. Not so!  

The gender pay disparity in education began long ago - I wrote about it in this newsletter - but since CBAs became commonplace in states where unionization is legal, I thought for sure they had taken care of the problem. They were supposed to. But this recent study of over 60,000 teachers nationwide in CBA-bearing districts demonstrates otherwise.¹ To save you the trouble, I read the narrative from start to finish, and though I do not speak the language of linear regression models, I will summarize the gist for you here:

• Men earn an average of $700 more per year on the base salary matrix than women, given same education/longevity, etc.

• Men earn an average of $1647 for additional duties, primarily coaching. Other additional duties pay less than that but still pay men more than women earn for them. CBAs often do not cover these duties-for-extra-pay and they can therefore be proffered more inequitably.

• In schools with male principals, the wage gap tends to be larger.

The study offers many possible reasons for these disparities, including the obvious “women must raise up the children” which probably explains why women tend to have these extra jobs less frequently. One feature that I did not consider, though, was that some of these extra jobs, like coaching, pay far less at the elementary level (seasons are shorter, etc.) and there are way more female teachers at that level, therefore more female coaches at that level, dragging down the average. 

As someone who is approaching retirement age, I naturally went straight to that dimension. Let’s compare a hypothetical male and female teacher in Montana, same education level, retiring with 30 years of experience,² and apply those same averages: females make $700 less than males, males earn the average coaching stipend. I set the final salary average at $65,000 - try not to get wrapped around the axle on this. The conceptual result is the same no matter what the amount is. Montana’s Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS) has formulas, and I used them here; just trust me.³

You can’t argue with arithmetic.

So what we have here shows male teachers bringing home substantially more pay, both during their teaching years and during their retirement years, since our teachers’ retirement is calculated in part by using pay rate. At the height, during coaching or whatever, that hypothetical male is pulling in $2347 per year more than his female counterpart, nearly $200 more per month. In five years, with coaching, that adds up to more than $11,700. And after retirement, the female will have about $100 less per month in her bank account. 

One more thing which my friend referenced in her story about Tom: Many (most? all?) school districts don’t offer paid maternity leave. What they do is “allow” you to take sick leave. This typically vacates a teacher’s sick leave bank, and if you run out of sick leave, you generally have to go without pay until you start working again.⁴ When kids get sick, moms tend to be the ones who stay home, continuing to deplete that bank. When teachers leave the district or retire, they are often paid out for unused sick leave, usually at a set percentage. Guess who ends a career with more sick leave for the payout, in general? These payouts also count toward those TRS totals, above.

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It’s not just a gender pay gap we are discussing. There’s also a gender gap in school leadership, reflecting the nationwide statistics across industries.

When we look at school district superintendents, who typically make much, much more than teachers, the gender disparity pretty much says it all. Nationwide, the percentage of male school superintendents is 73%, compared to 27% who are female according to this source.⁵ In an unscientific review of the school superintendents of Montana based on first name,⁶ I counted 81/261 female, or 31%. This tally includes county superintendents.⁷

So, let us review. Teachers tend to be female. Female teachers make less than male teachers. School and district leaders earn much more than do teachers - often more than twice as much, and they tend to be male, almost at the same ratio as they appear in teaching positions, but the reverse. Those facts are also part of this puzzle.

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I do not know if my own experience in schools reflects discrimination or not, since when I left my school district, I was earning the highest amount on the certified teacher salary matrix due to maxing out on education and experience.

I do know that people doing the hiring and paying have a lot of decision-making ability that can affect all kinds of things. For example, one school year, I was told to do far more than my job should have required. When I complained and asked for some compensation, the new superintendent scoffed at me. But after several months of watching me do my teaching job, plus run evening community meetings, plan and execute professional development, write and manage grants, and direct the district’s federal programs which require mountains of paperwork, he quietly assigned me a stipend on top of my regular salary, a form of merit pay. I appreciated it, and this obviously isn’t an example of the gender pay gap. Rather, it’s an example of how district leaders can circumvent the official rules without being totally illegal.

Another gray area can arise when a teacher is hired from another district. There are usually rules that govern how many years of experience they can be granted, thus placing them appropriately on the salary schedule. But what counts as “experience” can vary - that long term sub job, was that a year of experience? The year in a private school, did that count? This is exactly how Tom, from the top of this article, started out ahead of my friend, while her 4 months of hourly-no-benefit work put her behind him an additional year.

A school administrator has a lot of autonomy when it comes to making those cases, and as the study above suggests, a male administrator, which is most of them, may be more apt to award a male more of those favors.

I spotted this post lifted from the Secretary of Education’s own open letter while I was researching for this newsletter. Cute.

So, Secretary Cardona, I vaguely appreciate the unclear thought behind your bland LinkedIn post, and I’m distantly gratified you recognize that three quarters of your teaching force consists of women. But instead of offering 400 empty words about recognition and appreciation, you should make a forceful statement and initiate a plan to erase the gender pay gap. And then put money behind it.

The Halloween my high school’s staff dressed up as Gru and minions. Here you can see the gender breakdown: 16 females, 4 males, including the principal. P.S. That was a fun day, despite the optics.

1. Interestingly, and you’ll have to read the study for more explanation of this, the CBA does not seem to have the effect that you would anticipate. It’s supposed to even things out, partly because women in general tend not to negotiate pay for themselves. The CBA makes that negotiation unnecessary. But in districts where CBA rules appear to be more stringent, the wage gap actually increases. Researchers didn’t have a clear explanation for that.

2. Which, if the woman has availed herself of extended maternity leave during her career, will take her more years to achieve. Sure, a man can do this too, but how many men do you know who take long enough paternity leave to lose that year of creditable service?

3. I can see that you don’t trust me. All right, if you are a Tier 1 teacher not taking early retirement, you take your three-highest-consecutive-years-average (factoring in a 110% cap), multiply by the number of years of service and then multiply again by .016667. This is your annual benefit, before taxes. Check my math if you want.

4. I went back to work with my first baby after 4 weeks at home to avoid this. Luckily, my school had a day care on site and I was able to nurse and cuddle her during the day.

5. I checked several sources. Numbers varied slightly but all showed approximately this ratio.

6. Yes, I made a few assumptions, but mostly it was pretty clear.

7. County superintendents in Montana are much more frequently female; these officials are elected, not hired by school boards. Another interesting fact is that about half of school districts on Indian reservations have female superintendents. They pulled the numbers up for the overall female percentage in Montana.